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Diana Mortimore
In Biggles Sets a Trap, Diana Mortimore was the daughter of the wealthy banker Sir Joshua Mortimore and a neighbour of Sir Leofric Landaville who lived in the next estate. According to Johns' description, she was an attractive young woman of about twenty, fiar, with flaxen hair and blue eyes. She had flawless skin without a trace ofmake up and was of the "open air type". Besides having a wealthy father, Diana also had money in her own right, having been left a fortune bvy her mother. For some time she had been pursuing a relationship with the rather impoverished baronet Sir Leofric Landaville who lived at Ringlesby Hall. She was fond of him and she was certain he had the same feelings for her and she very much wanted to spend her money doing up the Hall which had fallen into a rather sad state of repair. She therefore could not understand why Leofric appeared so reticent in the matter of proposing marriage. After being introduced to Biggles by Leofric, she met him and Bertie again outside. There she took the opportunity to ask Biggles what he knew about Leofirc and his behaviour. To her he appeared to want to live a hermit like existence and seemed preoccupied about something. She asked if it was another woman and told Biggles that she had often seen Julia Warren riding past the Hall. Biggles told her that he could not betray a confidence but was at least able to reassure her that Leofric had no interest in Julia whatsoever. Loefirc might know of her by sight as the sister of the pub owner William Warren, but he did not know her personally and was not interested in her at all. Later, when someone took a shot at her and narrowly missed killing her by inches, Diana proved herself level-headed and sensible. She remained calm and merely drove up to Ringlesby to complain about the carelessness of poachers. Her calm demeanour convinced Biggles to take her into his confidence. Out alone, Biggles told her about the murder of Leofric's brother Sir Charles Landaville and the threat of death hanging over her boyfriend. This explained his reluctance to discuss marriage as he had no wish to make her an early widow. With the near miss on Diana, it seemed that her own life was also in danger. But she took the news calmly, promising to remain silent about what she had been told, and to watch her step and avoid going out as much as possible. Biggles assured her that these precautions were only temporary while he ran the murderer to ground. His assurance proved true as the threat extinguished itself over the next day or so when William Warren died in an car crash while escaping from a failed break-in attempt at Ringlesby Hall. The book ends with Leofric asking Diana to meet him to discuss a date for their marriage. Although Diana was wrong in suspecting that Leofric was interested in Julia, Biggles credited her for giving him the idea that the De Warine family (under the new of the Warrens) might have been seeking a different way of settling their score with the Landavilles. Julia would later tell Biggles her hypothesis that Richard might have shot at Diana in order to clear the way for her to marry Leofric, thus returning the De Warines to Ringlesby Hall and ending the feud. To Biggles, Diana might have intuitively spotted a potential rival, although not in the manner she was thinking of. Category:People Category:Biggles characters Category:Air Police era characters